What Twelve Cabin Crew Members Told Me About the Job

Choosing a career is difficult while the people who actually do the job know things that an applicant cannot see. When I was finishing college, books by people who had worked in the field were one way of hearing about an ordinary day before I had to make a choice.

Twelve People Who Had Done the Work

Won Hye-gyeong and eleven other contributors write about how they decided to become cabin crew, how they got hired and what happened after they began flying. The book came out in 2008. Recruitment has changed in the years since, and the pandemic interrupted air travel in ways the book could not have anticipated. Its accounts of doing the work are what I came for.

Early on, one contributor compares the job to working in entertainment. I took that as a reminder that the part of the work you can see is the public performance. Passengers see the people in uniform first, and an applicant can end up thinking mostly about the image.

What an Applicant Can Find Out

The contributors explain how they found openings and went through selection. Those pages describe a time and a set of airlines. For a current vacancy, an airline’s own careers page is a better starting point. Emirates, for example, maintains a careers site with a section for cabin crew.

I studied English literature, and a number of people I met through language departments considered airline work. I applied to Jeju Air myself and passed the application stage before going to an interview. The book helped give me questions to ask about the job while I was still finding out what I wanted to do.

I remember the book for how easy it was to listen to the contributors. The practical information has aged. Hearing several people describe how they found their way into the same work still makes it easier to imagine whether you would want to do it.

Emirates cabin crew careers